Abandoned railway carts
In this video I’m attempting to find out what’s on a set of tape cartridges discovered in a disused comms room at a railway station.
The video follows the process through, from figuring out the most likely tape track layout, to transferring the tapes and ultimately playing them back.
Special thanks to a Patron for the donation of the tapes - however I’m keeping his (or her) name confidential on this one.
UPDATE: Re-edited version uploaded and embedded above.
Comments (65)
Well worth the effort! Actually, I was expecting a message about the army of the twelve monkeys, but that's just me. I thought you might get your little magnetic viewer disc out to reveal the track topology.. I've been searching for one of those for yonks but never did find one, if you've any ideas where I might find one, please do let me know.. I remember when I worked for IBM way back when, we had this spray called MagnaSee did something similar - from memory, it was an alcohol spray with fine ferrous particles in suspension.. Spray on, see the tracks on the mag tape..
The tracks were recorded far too quietly to show up clearly on the magnetic viewer - the results were inconclusive. I had an ebay search for the 3M viewer for a few years - and got just the one hit. In the info under that video I linked to a modern day alternative which might suit.
Late to the party watching this video - but that jingle tape from WLUP in Chicago, Illinois brought back some memories. I grew up there. Small world. Great work recovering the last message from Rugby Station!
One day I’ll play through my box of jingle carts from the US - you may recognise a few more.
I’m late to watching this one, but I really enjoyed the mystery being solved. Definitely better than “knives out” ;-)
You do start to wonder how many different tape cartridge formats were in use you there! And you wonder what people would have done 30 years ago if they wanted to do the same thing....
I shed a tiny tear at "and then cued themselves up for the next announcement... that never happened". Lonesome little tapes.
Why did you use that 3M magnetic tape viewer device to see how many tracks? :D
Initially the thought never entered my mind as I was confident I'd correctly guessed the track layout, then later I checked but the recording was so quiet it barely registered and the results were inconclusive. I did put a bit about it in the video initially - but I could see it would just create strife, so removed it.
As a 'phone' guy ( IT/Comms engineer ) I was interested in seeing this, sadly couldn't get to the machine itself. The announcement threw me a little, the guy said "...as of XYZ 1993 ...please call 0203..." 0203 as an area code wasn't launched until 2005 ( maybe the 0203 was the end of the number ) Very intriguing . . . .
0203 was, I think, the code for Nuneaton / Coventry till 1995
I love these little insights into history - both of obscure media and of ordinary society. Maybe not very exciting, but interesting nonetheless!
I'm not one to chastise people for destroying old media in the name of science, but I did cry a bit on the inside when I saw you splice all 4 of them together. And moreso when they were all the same. dissapointing, but I hope the patron who sent them in has a few more laying around to preserve
I suspect that they would have been trashed eventually, and, without the subscriber sending them to Techmoan, they would have been lost totally.
I'm with you, Mat. The effort is half, if not most, of the fun! You might remember the old board game Mouse Trap. The slogan was "building it is half the fun!" The actual message you played had that far-away feeling of historical intimacy, but also the eeriness of listening to a number station of shortwave. I have to wonder how many other "abandoned" technologies are resting in situ just awaiting for urban archaeologists to discover.
Good point about the historical intimacy. I don't know if similar systems were used in the US ... although if they were, a stack of these abandoned phone announcements would make a great episode of Oddity Archive.
Thanks for sharing, not extremely exciting, but still, nice to see!
I'm not sure which part I liked better: the problem solving part (a.k.a. the squeeze) or the end result (the juice). Either way, that was a really enjoyable video. Thanks for liberating those cartridges, anonymous railway employee!
I think that playing around with a few quarter inch tapes on a rainy afternoon would do wonders for my blood pressure. No joke. Definitely worth the 'squeeze'.
Really liked this one! Not too often you can peek into the past with such a definitive result.
Now you have another type of cartridge you can buy off of eBay for shits & giggles :)
An excellent video, and the squeeze was definitely worth it. Thank you for making this,
These are really fun types of videos. Love them.
What interested me was that this was another, just slightly, different tape case. Why not HiPack or PlayTape or 8-Track or NAB Cart? Why make a different cart? Ahh, but that is probably lost to history. As for the content of the video, I think of the saying "The Journey is the Reward". I enjoyed traveling on the journey.
Ansafone would want to sell you their cartridges, just like Gillette and the blades.
Inquisitive is a good trait😊.
Presumably, to reduce wear it would have made sense to incorporate a (semi-) randomizer in the design of this so that a different tape is played each time. Even having someone manually rotate the tapes would have gone a long way. On the other hand, selling their proprietary tape cartridges was probably a part of Ansafone's business strategy... 🙄 Wonder if that orange tape was ever replaced, and this is the second, third, or fifth one? 🤔
Nice investigation. I can see why they abandoned such a system in 1993.
Neat. I like solved mysteries too!
Hi mat, great video! i have a question for the next oddcast: what do you think of the ps5 design? Or not of course! Nice weekend!
I’ll try my best to remember to mention something, but it’ll be more about the next gen in general than the designs as I’d be just as happy or unhappy whatever they looked like.
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Mat. Always up for a good "what's on this tape?" mystery. :D
Wrong speed. ...or did British Rail employ chipmunks? 🤔
As is often the case, the platform was more interesting than the actual content.
Mat, I'm just waiting for the day Interpol calls you up with a mystery tape they can't determine how to play. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you're going to (legally) get a video out of that one.
As funny as that sounds, it has a basis in reality. I doubt any organization maintains an "Obscure Recording Media" department.
Clickbait!!!!! I was waiting to hear abandoned railways, eerily announcing abandoned stops, with creaking carriages and the murmur of ghost riders. What a letdown. As far as the investigative work, I’m with you there. A month ago, I was trying to sort out some of my collection, and cleaned off an old GE rim drive recorder that had ended up in my attic. There was a tape on the machine, so I put batteries in to see if it worked. It worked just well enough for me to hear a boy’s voice talking about Christmas. I wanted to figure out how old the tape was, so I tried to pick up clues. The boy mentions 2 college football teams and how they had done that season, and by doing some research I determined it was probably 1967. I kept listening, and caught bits of the whole family speaking. Now I’m not going to give up here, so I start searching for the family names and found an obituary for the mother, which included all the other family names. I found the boy’s Denver phone number on the internet, and called and left a message. I also found what had to be the sisters on Facebook and messaged them, hoping that they wouldn’t think I was some sort is stalker or scammer. I also put a little clip on Facebook of an innocuous bit of the boy talking about the family car, and described what I was doing. The next day, the boy (now 66), called me, and we spoke for almost 2 hours. I told him other bits that I remembered from the tape, and he figured that it had to be a tape to his grandparents. He told me that his sister had called him the night before in a bit of a panic, and they had decided to report me to Facebook, until the sister found my Facebook post and played the recording. They were flabbergasted. Anyway, in the end I digitized the tape for them. The original rim drive recorder was so weak I had to turn the reels with my finger as the take up reel loaded, so I ended up using a capstan drive machine. That meant the speeds were going to be too slow at the beginning and too fast at the end, but I was pleasantly surprised that Audacity has a graduated pitch and speed conversion that was perfect for my needs. I’ve since shared the files with the 3 family members and have made some new distant friends. Sorry for the great length of this comment. I’ve found this experience to be very rewarding, and I’m happy there hasn’t been any family rifts, so that they were all able to enjoy the recordings, especially of long lost parents.
Great job with the investigation - and with a very happy ending too. Thanks for sharing this.
Hearing an announcement from British Rail feels as historic as hearing an announcement from Post Office Telephones or the BBC Home Service.
Nice short and sweet video. One criticism for your consideration — I was a bit annoyed by the "if you have a heart condition" thing, because not only is it an old joke, it's, hm, a fake hazard warning of a sort. I think the world contains too many of those — and also it's stressful for _me_ listening to wonder if you're being serious; gets the adrenaline going a bit.
I must remind myself never to try to be funny - it never works. A re-edit is in the process of being uploaded to expunge the offending section.
When it comes to audio my curiosity always get the better of me. Some was asking to transcribe some 78 RPM records and I worked out that if I played them at 45 RPM I could convert the speed by other methods. For a point of interest I came across a guy the other day who coverts cassette decks to take a mobile phone. The phone sits where the cassette would anomaly be and he has a picture of cassette on the phone screen which changes to another brand. I think it is based on an Android app. Thanks for taking enough effort to see this one though. I did wonder what format and speed that companies like Racal made use of.
Yes the Tapeless deck chap - http://www.mp3tapelessdeck.pl I think he may have been in touch once, but I've purposely avoided featuring them. Showing these could well cause a riot - not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea of gutting a classic tape deck to stick an MP3 player in it.
I love this story. You weave your experience and your enthusiasm and your old hardware to turn something that would be a boring playback into an amazing history lesson. I really liked that you spent time thinking about what to do rather than mindlessly jumping into it. Also, the reveal was great!!! Better than regular timetables and not something I expected, but obvious in retrospect. A very nice send off. Thank you. Also kudos to the person who “liberated” the tapes!
Nice to see one of the few YouTubers I subscribe to that isn't devoted to rail, cover a rail topic. And right after you kind of did a beer based video too. Did you pay for some Subscriber Insights or something, and find Rail and Ale?
Next week...Beard Trimmers?
The squeeze is the most interesting part of playing around with things a lot of the time, I find. Once I've figured out how something works I lose interest.
Quite a large playback and recording machine at the station.
I'd have thought that the first thing to do before you could figure out what sort of tape player to use would be to use the 3M magnifier to look at the track layout. Well, you sorted that I guess. Anyway, I now insist that you hire a van to go to Rugby (couldn't be that far away, only about a couple of hundred miles, right?) drag that big Ansaphone machine out of there, down the stairs, back to your house and into that crowded spare bedroom studio to for our entertainment;)
I forgot I owned the 3M device until the end of day two. Although the results were inconclusive as the audio was so quiet it barely registered.
Rugby is also my home town. Small world!
As Steven Wright once said - ‘It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it”
Star Trek 8 track I'm jealous lol
It was still sealed too, but I opened it up as I knew it would be at the splice. Other carts I’d have to play through.
Hi Mat. Really enjoyed video. Your voice notiably changed when you went to spooling section. Presume different mic or different part of day. Also when you said I will put link up it didn't appear on my video. Not being picky just making you aware. Love your videos.
It depends on your browser or app. It is there on the web version.
The part of the message where the announcer thanked people for their support was oddly touching, like a last message from a sinking ship.
...and now we’ll play ‘nearer my god to thee.’
Nice video. I agree, the process of making the tape playable is the fun part. Did you play the video of the Sony playing the tape (starting at 11:30) at half speed, too?
I did - to keep some kind of authenticity I shot it in 1080p60 then slowed it to 1080p30 to match the rest of the 4K30 video.
Is it just me, or is the announcer on the tapes super calming? I've always been obsessed with the calming and slightly eerie beauty of the Shipping Report/fishermans weather report etc. Somehow they find the most calming voices ever. I even wrote an ambient music track with the shipping report on it. https://soundcloud.com/ceramicvase/they-all-followed-the-broadcast-and-met-at-the-shore?ref=clipboard.
He was originally too calming. I ended up increasing the tempo by 20% while keeping the pitch the same.
As a bit of an occasional railway enthusiast, I really enjoyed this one. It was rather interesting to hear a little remnant of the bygone British Rail era.
Enjoyable subject. Thanks Mat. :)
Oh boy, tape in strange plastic shells! My favorite food. 😻